KIIT students unite for the Millennium Development Goals in Orissa and beyond

Source: Rissadaily.com

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Report by Rashmi r Parida; Bhubaneswar: Innovation, challenge, vibrancy, out-of-the box, sacrifice, leadership, societal-commitment, and citizen engineers are some of the things that resonated during an interactive dialogue session on ‘Youth and Millennium Development Goals’ organized by the KIIT Centre for the Environment and Global Sustainability (KIIT-CEGS) to mark the beginning of the International Year of Youth (2010-2011).

Realizing the urgency to support and strengthen youth’s continuous engagement in and contribution to various development and governance challenges, the United Nations has declared the year beginning 12 August 2010 as the International Year of Youth with a theme of ‘Our Year Our Voice’.

This dialogue session was organized to capture the opportunities offered through the theme (Dialogue and Mutual Understanding) of the International Youth Day (12 August) and the year of mid-term review of the Millennium Development Goals (September 2010).

Rooted in KIIT University’s longstanding tradition of and emphasis on societal engagement and contribution through empowerment and capacity development, this dialogue session helped students to better appreciate the urgency for ‘all to unite’ to achieve these MDGs.

Speaking on the occasion, Prof. A. S. Kolaskar, Vice Chancellor, KIIT University underscored the need to channelize the untapped potential of ‘young minds’ for greater social causes of poverty reduction and environmental sustainability.

Helping the students to better understand and address the issues of Millennium Development Goals, which is a set of eight goals with specific targets, Ms. Srabani Das, State Coordinator for the Millennium Campaign encouraged the students to consider ‘My Development Goals’. This provides an opportunity for these young students to connect to and think about the Millennium Development Goals.

Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are often mis-understood as a set of goals of the United Nations (UN) not of much concern for the common man and not connected to their day-to-day-lives and opportunities for development. These are a set of ‘agreed upon’ goals affirmed through the Millennium Declarations 2000. ‘Our aim is to make MDGs everyone’s business’, remarked one of the student participants.

Such initiatives also hold much potential to initiate and build an active public constituency on MDGs and thereby gather the much required critical mass and political will to work towards these MDGs.

“This is the first step towards a process of informed engagement and affirmative action by the youth”, emphasized Jyotiraj Patra, Coordinator, KIIT-CEGS. He also informed about KIIT University’s ongoing efforts to work in partnership with diverse stakeholders and groups for a series of programmes primarily supporting the youth and their initiatives as part of the International Year of Youth (2010-2011).